By EMILY EAKIN
Published: December 20, 2003
he English mistook the Indians' war chants for songs of welcome, while the Indians mistook the red wine the settlers offered them for blood. When Powhatan, the powerful Chesapeake chief, offered food to the Jamestown settlers, it was to signal the visitors' dependent status, allies who required his protection. To his delighted guests, however, the gesture had another meaning: proof of willing subordination. The Indians, the English agreed with relief, would become docile subjects of King James.
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So went some of the culture clashes in the New World as Europeans and Native Americans encountered each other for the first time. Misunderstanding was inevitable, says Peter Charles Hoffer, a historian at the University of Georgia who cites these incidents in his new book, "Sensory Worlds in Early America" (Johns Hopkins University Press). But violence, he insists, was not. The reason potentially benign missteps escalated into war, he argues, had originally less to do with competition over land and resources than the simple fact that "the two peoples employed their senses in such profoundly different ways."
Mr. Hoffer offers a catalog of sensory conflict, from Jamestown — where the Indians saw a densely populated woods bordered by water, and the English saw an uninhabited peninsula ripe for settlement — to pre-Revolutionary Boston, where rioting mobs engaged in "sensory warfare," destroying the visual symbols of British rule. His book is the latest bid in an increasingly aggressive campaign to elevate sight, sound, smell, touch and taste to a central place in the study of history.
"There's a tremendous interest in the sensory," Mr. Hoffer said in a telephone interview. "But I think I'm the only one who's dared to argue that these elementary sensory perceptions are causes, dictating in a thousand ways how we respond."
It was Aristotle who first defined the five senses, enumerating their properties in "De Anima," his meditation on the soul from about 350 B.C. His list, Mr. Hoffer points out, was more subjective than scientific: rival theories proposed 10 or more senses, including memory, instinct and imagination. But by the Enlightenment, Aristotle's five — dominated by sight — had become deep-seated cultural conventions.
So much so that until recently scholars paid them little heed. In the 1930's the French Annales school historian Lucien Febvre called for a cultural "history of the sensibilities," which, he said, would reveal the gradual triumph of reason over raw emotion. But more than half a century later, in a 1994 essay in The Journal of American History, George H. Roeder Jr., a professor of liberal arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, could still complain that "ours is a nearly sense-less profession." ("A Natural History of the Senses," the 1990 best seller by the poet and science writer Diane Ackerman, was a notable exception. But it was less a work of scholarship than a creative meditation on scientific research into the senses.)
A mere decade later, however, Mr. Roeder's charge is clearly no longer accurate. The senses — or several of them at least — are hot. The proof is a recent spate of papers, conference sessions and books devoted to sensory history, including "Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell" (Routledge, 1994), by Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott; "Listening to 19th-Century America" (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), by Mark M. Smith; "The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America" (M.I.T. Press, 2002), by Emily Thompson; and "How Early America Sounded" (Cornell University Press, 2003) by Richard Cullen Rath.
In addition the works of Alain Corbin, a French sensory historian, have been translated into English, among them, "Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside" (Columbia University Press, 1998), a 300-page study of the social function of church bells.
Few of these authors echo Mr. Hoffer's radical view that "sensation and perception affected some of those great events whose cause and course we historians conventionally attribute to deep cultural structures and overarching material forces."
And few appear to share his confidence that the fleeting sensory experiences of an earlier people can be reconstructed by historians working today. Or, for that matter, easily rendered in print. (Mr. Hoffer calls this the "lemon problem": "I can taste a lemon and savor the immediate experience of my senses; I can recall the taste after I have thrown away the fruit; but can I use words and pictures to convey to another person exactly what that sensation was?") Mr. Corbin, for example, has called sensory history "a gamble" that is "risky but fascinating."
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But even the more cautious sensory historians insist that studies of smell, sound, taste or touch amply repay the challenges involved, "adding texture to an already understood narrative," as Mr. Smith, a historian at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, put it.
In some ways, Mr. Smith said, historians have been doing a kind of sensory history all along, unconsciously biased toward vision. As he argues in "Making Sense of Social History," an essay in the fall issue of the Journal of Social History, "The vast majority of historians still work from the assumption that the past is best seen rather than, say, heard or smelled." By focusing on senses other than sight, he said, sensory historians provide necessary correctives.
Why sound has received more attention than smell, taste and touch so far is a matter of debate. Mr. Rath, a historian at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, speculated that new media technologies have something to do with it.
"Audio has made a comeback during the last century because of new media," he said. "Sound recording, audio tracking of movies and video, online MP3's, all have re-sounded our ways of thinking." Still, he stressed, in today's visual culture sound does not play the dominant role it once did. He cited accounts of thunderstorms left by 17th-century Americans as an example. In their view, he said, it was thunder, not lightning that caused physical damage.
With the spread of mass print media, Mr. Rath said, sound gradually became less important. "Now," he added, "we may be in the midst of another shift with the advent of the Internet."
Mr. Smith was optimistic that all five senses would eventually get their due. "Once historians begin to think in sensorial terms, work on taste and touch will probably balloon, just as it has with aurality," he said, adding that several long-neglected senses are turning out to be crucial to his current project: a history of Americans' changing conceptions of race.
"In the 19th century white Southerners began to talk about blacks in terms of smell because they were no longer sure they could differentiate black and white by sight alone," he said. "Questions of touching (handshake, caress, pummel) and taste (eating, kissing) are of immense relevance. It becomes quite clear that smell, taste and touch are, or at least should be, important not only to understanding the paternalist thrust of antebellum slavery but to the evolution of segregation after the Civil War."
Good article here. I'm going to be working with Mark Smith, and hopefully doing something on the senses- especially religious history around the revolution and the senses.
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Published: December 20, 2003
he English mistook the Indians' war chants for songs of welcome, while the Indians mistook the red wine the settlers offered them for blood. When Powhatan, the powerful Chesapeake chief, offered food to the Jamestown settlers, it was to signal the visitors' dependent status, allies who required his protection. To his delighted guests, however, the gesture had another meaning: proof of willing subordination. The Indians, the English agreed with relief, would become docile subjects of King James.
Advertisement
So went some of the culture clashes in the New World as Europeans and Native Americans encountered each other for the first time. Misunderstanding was inevitable, says Peter Charles Hoffer, a historian at the University of Georgia who cites these incidents in his new book, "Sensory Worlds in Early America" (Johns Hopkins University Press). But violence, he insists, was not. The reason potentially benign missteps escalated into war, he argues, had originally less to do with competition over land and resources than the simple fact that "the two peoples employed their senses in such profoundly different ways."
Mr. Hoffer offers a catalog of sensory conflict, from Jamestown — where the Indians saw a densely populated woods bordered by water, and the English saw an uninhabited peninsula ripe for settlement — to pre-Revolutionary Boston, where rioting mobs engaged in "sensory warfare," destroying the visual symbols of British rule. His book is the latest bid in an increasingly aggressive campaign to elevate sight, sound, smell, touch and taste to a central place in the study of history.
"There's a tremendous interest in the sensory," Mr. Hoffer said in a telephone interview. "But I think I'm the only one who's dared to argue that these elementary sensory perceptions are causes, dictating in a thousand ways how we respond."
It was Aristotle who first defined the five senses, enumerating their properties in "De Anima," his meditation on the soul from about 350 B.C. His list, Mr. Hoffer points out, was more subjective than scientific: rival theories proposed 10 or more senses, including memory, instinct and imagination. But by the Enlightenment, Aristotle's five — dominated by sight — had become deep-seated cultural conventions.
So much so that until recently scholars paid them little heed. In the 1930's the French Annales school historian Lucien Febvre called for a cultural "history of the sensibilities," which, he said, would reveal the gradual triumph of reason over raw emotion. But more than half a century later, in a 1994 essay in The Journal of American History, George H. Roeder Jr., a professor of liberal arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, could still complain that "ours is a nearly sense-less profession." ("A Natural History of the Senses," the 1990 best seller by the poet and science writer Diane Ackerman, was a notable exception. But it was less a work of scholarship than a creative meditation on scientific research into the senses.)
A mere decade later, however, Mr. Roeder's charge is clearly no longer accurate. The senses — or several of them at least — are hot. The proof is a recent spate of papers, conference sessions and books devoted to sensory history, including "Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell" (Routledge, 1994), by Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott; "Listening to 19th-Century America" (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), by Mark M. Smith; "The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America" (M.I.T. Press, 2002), by Emily Thompson; and "How Early America Sounded" (Cornell University Press, 2003) by Richard Cullen Rath.
In addition the works of Alain Corbin, a French sensory historian, have been translated into English, among them, "Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside" (Columbia University Press, 1998), a 300-page study of the social function of church bells.
Few of these authors echo Mr. Hoffer's radical view that "sensation and perception affected some of those great events whose cause and course we historians conventionally attribute to deep cultural structures and overarching material forces." And few appear to share his confidence that the fleeting sensory experiences of an earlier people can be reconstructed by historians working today. Or, for that matter, easily rendered in print. (Mr. Hoffer calls this the "lemon problem": "I can taste a lemon and savor the immediate experience of my senses; I can recall the taste after I have thrown away the fruit; but can I use words and pictures to convey to another person exactly what that sensation was?") Mr. Corbin, for example, has called sensory history "a gamble" that is "risky but fascinating." Advertisement But even the more cautious sensory historians insist that studies of smell, sound, taste or touch amply repay the challenges involved, "adding texture to an already understood narrative," as Mr. Smith, a historian at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, put it. In some ways, Mr. Smith said, historians have been doing a kind of sensory history all along, unconsciously biased toward vision. As he argues in "Making Sense of Social History," an essay in the fall issue of the Journal of Social History, "The vast majority of historians still work from the assumption that the past is best seen rather than, say, heard or smelled." By focusing on senses other than sight, he said, sensory historians provide necessary correctives. Why sound has received more attention than smell, taste and touch so far is a matter of debate. Mr. Rath, a historian at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, speculated that new media technologies have something to do with it. "Audio has made a comeback during the last century because of new media," he said. "Sound recording, audio tracking of movies and video, online MP3's, all have re-sounded our ways of thinking." Still, he stressed, in today's visual culture sound does not play the dominant role it once did. He cited accounts of thunderstorms left by 17th-century Americans as an example. In their view, he said, it was thunder, not lightning that caused physical damage. With the spread of mass print media, Mr. Rath said, sound gradually became less important. "Now," he added, "we may be in the midst of another shift with the advent of the Internet." Mr. Smith was optimistic that all five senses would eventually get their due. "Once historians begin to think in sensorial terms, work on taste and touch will probably balloon, just as it has with aurality," he said, adding that several long-neglected senses are turning out to be crucial to his current project: a history of Americans' changing conceptions of race. "In the 19th century white Southerners began to talk about blacks in terms of smell because they were no longer sure they could differentiate black and white by sight alone," he said. "Questions of touching (handshake, caress, pummel) and taste (eating, kissing) are of immense relevance. It becomes quite clear that smell, taste and touch are, or at least should be, important not only to understanding the paternalist thrust of antebellum slavery but to the evolution of segregation after the Civil War."
- bill 12-22-2003 5:08 pm
Good article here. I'm going to be working with Mark Smith, and hopefully doing something on the senses- especially religious history around the revolution and the senses.
- Andy (guest) 12-09-2004 12:31 am [add a comment]